Gender

It [gender dysphoria] is definitely a real feeling! But being uncomfortable is part of being human. If you can’t cope with those feelings, then you need help learning better ways to cope…Feelings are feelings. Feeling something doesn’t mean it is true or real.

All expressed they were convinced by trans activists that transition was the answer and now they live with the negative consequences of that decision.

Activists would have the public believe that anyone who expresses a wish to be the other gender should be allowed and encouraged to do so. Credulous politicians have translated their demands into law.

...parents expressed anxiety over the speed with which the gender professionals involved accepted their teenagers’ self-diagnosis, demonstrated by recommendations for puberty blocking agents after a single visit.

Clinicians are divided. Adelaide endocrinologist Professor Jenny Couper upholds the court veto. “You can’t reverse testosterone treatment for female to male adolescents, which makes paediatric endocrinologists pretty anxious.

Dysphoria Always Has a Deeper Root

So many traumas can cause gender dysphoria, including emotional loss, abuse, and extreme changes in the home. According to research, almost two-thirds (62.7 percent) of transgender people have some type of co-existing psychiatric disorder, such as depression, phobias, and adjustment disorders.

My psychologist understood I had dysphoria and we worked through the trauma that caused it.

I’m glad she (mum) didn’t believe I was a boy trapped in a girl’s body. I’m glad she found a psychologist who saw how scared and angry and hurt I was and who wanted to help me with those things first instead of also helping me transition to be a boy.

They’d say I should think about why I felt that way, the reasons for feeling that way, and any other perspectives or reasons someone might feel that way. And that I should also think about my history and my experiences and relationships and why I might feel uncomfortable or not want to be a girl.

Adults think with the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational part....Teens process information with the amygdala. This is the emotional part.

Current popular delusions are aspirations ... to transcend the laws of biology and transmute human nature. Among them is the popular belief that gender is fungible (interchangeable), so that whether we are born male or female is of no consequence.

Another manifestation of denial of the biological differences between the sexes takes the form of a man’s declaring, in effect, “My gender is what I say it is. I feel like I’m a woman in a man’s body, and I demand that I be treated like one.” The demands that society accommodate such absurd personal delusions are becoming ever more aggressive.

In short, a mature and stable self-image involves knowing oneself and one’s place in the world. Life’s inevitable vicissitudes (fluctuations), at every developmental stage from childhood to old age, can test our self-image and produce self-doubt. Popular delusions such as the transgender craze offer simplistic explanations and solutions for the multidimensional life crises of identity.

Transient developmental crises that would be amenable (responsive) to appropriate psychotherapy are turned into profoundly life-altering, irreversible physical mutilations.

These kids are being lied to by the very people they should be able to trust: doctors, psychiatrists and teachers. They are being reinvented, medicated and operated on in some creepy Dr Moreau-ish experiment that can only end in disaster for most of them.

Moreover, in recent years, advocacy on behalf of the transgender community has seen medical gatekeeping reduced so that, in many places in the US, young people like Molly can access medical transition without any diagnostic or assessment process.

I eventually stopped looking for validation as something I would never be, and started the process of loving myself.

For a long time, I’ve been hesitant to talk about my experience with trans. I was embarrassed, for one, into being duped by an agenda that wanted to convince me I was something I’m not, nor would ever be....because there’s something more important at stake: young women learning to love themselves. If I can convince even just one girl to love her body for what it is, and to know that no amount of dissatisfaction with stereotypes, or love for suits and sports, or short hair, or discomfort with her anatomy makes her less of a woman, then any shit cast my way is worth it.

I don’t know anyone my age who hasn’t felt uncomfortable about their bodies at some point. Everyone I know wishes there was something different about their bodies.

If it is on your mind 24/7 and you feed that idea, you give that idea power – and you start to feel like you need to do something to your body to feel better.

It isn’t conversion therapy to learn to love yourself or at least, feel like you can live in your own body without hurting it on purpose.

If medical transition wasn’t available, I don’t think it would matter if a girl thinks she’s a boy for a while, because she wouldn’t be encouraged to do things that are harmful.

You weren’t born in the wrong body because that’s not possible.

You were born into a society where looks mean everything. But really our bodies are just what keep us alive. Why don’t we fight back against the idea that any person looks wrong as they are? Your “outside” doesn’t need to “match your inside.” The outside isn’t important enough to hurt yourself over.

Go outside. Move your body. Make art, do something. Don’t spend time with other people’s stories about self-loathing and self-diagnosis. Stop feeling oppressed when you’re probably not oppressed. I know transitioning can make you feel like you get a lot of control but medically transitioning doesn’t give you power. It just makes someone else money.

There’s a very specific kind of mental mind-fuck that went on on Tumblr during this time that cultivated the perfect atmosphere for confused, self-hating teens (which is like, all of them) to somehow come to the realization that they’re transgender. First came a kind of twisted rewriting of history, women like Joan of Arc...became ‘trans men who didn’t know at the time, because it wasn’t accepted’.

Another thing was the constant validation of trans people. In order for me to become instantly ‘valid,’ all I had to do was be a man. How could I do that? By feeling like one. What did that feel like? I don’t know, since I didn’t feel like a woman, which I now realize is because I can’t; woman isn’t a feeling.

The most harmful message to come out of the cultist ideology of trans rights is that 'you are x because you feel like x'. But in the same way that I didn’t feel working class, or feel like a white person, or feel like a Midwesterner, I didn’t feel like a woman, which according to trans ideology, meant I wasn’t ‘cisgender’, and so from that the leap was easy for me to make: I must be a man.

It at the time all seemed very progressive: by ignoring history and biology, we could rewrite reality, and anyone could be anything they wanted. First of all, words didn’t have meaning anymore. According to new gender logic, even male and female were fluid.

By the time my mother figured out what was going on with me, I was in deep. Female-to-Male transition videos filled my Youtube suggestions.

Going to someone who would try to get to the root of my identity and dysphoria and resolving that cause itself instead of validating my mental illness and okaying a lifetime of hormones, mutilation, and sterilization was paramount.

The most helpful thing she did for me was make me examine why I identified as a boy, and what that meant. By being asked to define what being a boy felt like without using anything that I already knew was only a stereotype about boys, and my subsequent failure to do so, I eventually came to terms with the fact that I couldn’t be one.

In general, kids that desist are a bit embarrassed by the whole thing. They don’t want to be paraded through the press, admitting they ‘made a mistake’, or to be on the receiving end of accusations of transphobia and deception: they just want to forget about it and get on with life. You won’t hear much from them. You won’t see photos of them in glossy magazines & on the internet.

Once everyone around you is reinforcing your delusion it must become very hard to turn back from the glitter-strewn yellow brick road. It’s even harder for those who detransition. 21 year old Zhara says, “It sounds weird so I don’t usually say it. It’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing to go back.”

Misinformation and true information often look awfully alike. The key to an informed life may not require gathering information as much as it does challenging the ideas you already have or have recently encountered. This may be an unpleasant task, and an unending one, but it is the best way to ensure that your brainy intellectual tapestry sports only true colors.